While psychologists analyze network game-playing behavior in terms of players' social interaction and experience, understanding user behavior is equally important to network researchers, because how players act determines how well systems, such as MMORPGs, perform. To gain a better understanding of patterns of player interaction and their implications for game design, we analyze a 1,356-million-packet trace of Shen-Zhou Online, a mid-sized commercial MMORPG. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to put forward architectural design recommendations for online games based on analysis of player interaction.

We find that the dispersion of players in a virtual world is heavy-tailed, which implies that static and fixed-size partitioning of game worlds is inadequate. Neighbors and teammates tend to be closer to each other in network topology. This property is an advantage, because message delivery between the hosts of interacting players can be faster than between those of unrelated players. In addition, the property can make game playing fairer, since interacting players tend to have similar latencies to their servers. We also find that participants who have a higher degree of social interaction tend to play much longer, and players who are closer in network topology tend to team up for longer periods. This suggests that game designers could increase the stickiness of games by supporting, or even forcing, team playing.